Rated G, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with Audrey Tautou (Amelie Poulain), Mathieu Kassovitz (Nino Quincammpoix), Rufus (Amelie's father), Yolande Moreau (Madeleine Wallace), running time: 122 minutes. In French, with Chinese subtitles.
Amelie Poulain is a waitress in a Montmarte cafe who lives a quiet life in a building occupied by some unusual characters; a weepy conciege, a painter with fragile bones who each year repaints a celebrated Renoir, and a dyspeptic grocer. When one day she finds a box of childhood memories stashed in her apartment decades earlier, she vows to return the contents to its estranged owner. This simple act of kindness alters the course of her life as she dedicates herself to becoming a doer of increasingly complex good deeds for the woebegone -- along the way, of course, discovering love. Jeunet, who's never made an upbeat film in his life, set out to do just that here. Given the film's popularity in France, he seems to have been successful. Fifty million French people can't be wrong. Or so the saying goes.
It’s a good thing that 2025 is over. Yes, I fully expect we will look back on the year with nostalgia, once we have experienced this year and 2027. Traditionally at New Years much discourse is devoted to discussing what happened the previous year. Let’s have a look at what didn’t happen. Many bad things did not happen. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not attack Taiwan. We didn’t have a massive, destructive earthquake or drought. We didn’t have a major human pandemic. No widespread unemployment or other destructive social events. Nothing serious was done about Taiwan’s swelling birth rate catastrophe.
Words of the Year are not just interesting, they are telling. They are language and attitude barometers that measure what a country sees as important. The trending vocabulary around AI last year reveals a stark divergence in what each society notices and responds to the technological shift. For the Anglosphere it’s fatigue. For China it’s ambition. For Taiwan, it’s pragmatic vigilance. In Taiwan’s annual “representative character” vote, “recall” (罷) took the top spot with over 15,000 votes, followed closely by “scam” (詐). While “recall” speaks to the island’s partisan deadlock — a year defined by legislative recall campaigns and a public exhausted
In the 2010s, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began cracking down on Christian churches. Media reports said at the time that various versions of Protestant Christianity were likely the fastest growing religions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The crackdown was part of a campaign that in turn was part of a larger movement to bring religion under party control. For the Protestant churches, “the government’s aim has been to force all churches into the state-controlled organization,” according to a 2023 article in Christianity Today. That piece was centered on Wang Yi (王怡), the fiery, charismatic pastor of the
Hsu Pu-liao (許不了) never lived to see the premiere of his most successful film, The Clown and the Swan (小丑與天鵝, 1985). The movie, which starred Hsu, the “Taiwanese Charlie Chaplin,” outgrossed Jackie Chan’s Heart of Dragon (龍的心), earning NT$9.2 million at the local box office. Forty years after its premiere, the film has become the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) 100th restoration. “It is the only one of Hsu’s films whose original negative survived,” says director Kevin Chu (朱延平), one of Taiwan’s most commercially successful
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